Drag leaves down and attach them to the tree. Every time you add a
leaf, the description of the treehouse grows and changes. The changes
are random... aren’t they?

My Secret Hideout has no goal, no score, no trophies. Explore
it, or play with it, until you find a result you like. Will your
treehouse be simple or complex? Can you guide it? What will you discover
inside?

What To Do

Drag a leaf from the top, and drop it down next to the root of the
tree. (Not right on top of it!) It will stick. There — your tree
has grown a new branch.

Now look at the text on the left. It doesn’t say what it said before.
Try adding another leaf, or moving one of the leaves around. Every
change you make causes new possibilities to unfold.
As your tree grows larger, new rooms may appear in the treehouse.

Your Library

Every treehouse you create is yours, but you may find a few that you
particularly enjoy. To save a treehouse (and its tree), tap the
“Library” button in the top corner. You’ll see the current treehouse
saved as a card, along with every treehouse you’ve saved previously.
Tap a card to pop it out into the main work area.

Tap the “Export” button to email your creation to a friend,
or post it as a photo to your Facebook wall (if you’re a Facebook
sort of person).

You can
also save the tree image to your iOS photo album (camera roll). Finally, you can
copy either the text or the image to the iOS pasteboard; they can then
be pasted into any other application that supports text or image editing.

Using VoiceOver

My Secret Hideout fully supports VoiceOver. When VoiceOver is on,
the bottom toolbar contains a “Read” button. You can use this
at any time to read out the current text.

To build your tree, select one of the Leaf Source targets at the top.
Double tap and hold, and then drag the leaf down towards the bottom
of the screen. When it gets near the tree, you will hear a sound effect.
Release the leaf, and then use the “Read” button to hear the
changed text.

How It Works

My Secret Hideout is an example of procedural text
generation. The tree you build — the shape and position of
every leaf — forms the seed to a pseudo-random number
generator. Then a text-generator grammar consumes the random numbers
to build a text. It’s all completely deterministic; if two
people created exactly the same tree structure, they’d get
exactly the same text out. (But you’d have to be very precise
about the leaf positions.)

How many possible texts can it generate? At a rough estimate,
a googol different combinations. That’s 10100,
give or take a few dozen orders of magnitude.

About the Author

Andrew Plotkin
is the author of many well-known works of
interactive fiction. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he
is hard at work researching both classic forms of digital interactivity
(like text adventures) and new forms (like
My Secret Hideout).